Martin Bridson

Martin Robert Bridson (born 22 October 1964) is a Manx mathematician.

He is Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute.

He was previously the head of Oxford's Mathematical Institute.

He is a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.

Specializing in geometry, topology and group theory, Bridson is best known for his work in geometric group theory.

Bridson is a native of the Isle of Man.

He was educated at St Ninian's High School, Douglas, then Hertford College, Oxford, and Cornell University, receiving a Master of Arts degree from Oxford in 1986, and a Master of Science degree in 1988 followed by a PhD in 1991 from Cornell.

His PhD thesis was supervised by Karen Vogtmann, and was entitled Geodesics and Curvature in Metric Simplicial Complexes.

From 1993 to 2002 he was a Tutorial Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and Reader (1996) then Professor of Topology (2000) in the University of Oxford.

He remains a Supernumerary Fellow of Pembroke College.

He was an assistant professor at Princeton University until 1996, was twice a visiting professor at the University of Geneva (1992 and 2006), and was Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London from 2002 to 2007.

Bridson was an invited lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006.

In 2016, Bridson became only the second Manxman to ever be elected to the Royal Society, after Edward Forbes.

In 2020, he was elected to Academia Europaea.

With André Haefliger, he won

the 2020 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for the highly influential book Metric Spaces of Non-positive Curvature, published by Springer-Verlag in 1999.